What has happend to the SL Viewer?

[Victoria Hoorenbeek]

Hi there, I have been absent from Second Life for about 2 years. Now I have reinstalled the Viewer and I experience several issues: 1. Can not set display resolution. I spmply can't. Why has this been dropped from the configuration? I also can not switch to fullscreen 2. Performance is very, very bad. I remember running SL on my old machine with about half the RAM, a much slower CPU and a graphics card you can not even compare to my current one. Can anyone explain what has happend here? This is not an issue of my machine, since a large number of 3D applications runs smoothly on it. 3. Can not move the camera. I just can't. Only via the little HUD element, but by dragging the mouse with the right button pressed. Has SL evolved back? What has happend here? In this state, this is not worth looking at. Kind regards

[Marigold Devin]

Welcome back to Second Life, Victoria, and Second Life forums.

Take heart, for if you were able to run Second Life previously without problems, you should still be able to.  I've been in Second Life for almost four years, with a mid-range spec computer, and it's still running problem free. 

You should be able to set your display resolution outside of Second Life, and that should be enough to view Second Life's viewer ok. 

However, you tell us you are using a different machine to run Second Life now, and it would be very useful if you could post those specifications here.  It could be that the version of the Second Life viewer that you've downloaded isn't currently compatible. 

I would recommend trying the approved Third Party Viewer, Phoenix.  Download is available from ...

http://www.phoenixviewer.com/downloads.php   (scroll down the page for Phoenix, as Firestorm uses the new Viewer 2 code, rather than the Viewer 1 code that you might be more used to - but this is personal preference).

And another thought is, if you've installed the latest Second Life Viewer, you might have inadvertantly got it running in Basic Mode, so you need to log out and log back in using Advanced Mode.  (This feature was brought in by LL, in the hope it would simplify things for the newer users, and encourage them to stay.)

I hope some of this information is helpful to you, and you start to enjoy Second Life.

Good luck.

[LoveAngeL Lyre]

Hello Victoria and welcome to SL Forums. Other the system requirements for the old Viewer 1.23 and other for the Viewer 3. SL is a very demanding application. I don't know if you tried to set your performance to lower under your Preferences. You can also download again the old viewer 1.23, it is still available here. About your 3rd question you can do that. Preferences --> Move & View Tab --> Single click on land --> No action.

[Tristizia Demonista]

I guess you mean the size of your SL-Window, because the screen resolution is allways the same as your Desktop. You can set the Window Size under Advanced Menu/Set Window Size

[Linda Brynner]

Welcome back Victoria.

Since your 2 years LL has introduced to viewer 2 and since the new CEO at LL updates have been very very veyr quick. We are already at viewer 3. The full screen option is out and performance has dropped for too many.

This is what is going on...

Viewer 2 has already been highly under huge fire since only a handful seems to like it, but worse... with each quick release of an update came terrible show stop problems for too many users.

HTTP textures and  HTTP inventory doesn't work well for everybody and worse... for Duo core computers FPS has dropped significant since 2.8, like from an averge 35-45 to 1-5. I don't know if that is fixed yet.

Meanwhile the Pheonix viewer and its team was busted for creating a visrus attack. Since then LL works with an approved list of 3rd party viewers. But to me... i just don't trust that and the conditions from LL to get on that list aren't that professional.

I waved 2/3 goodbye after a half year of all kinds of misery and went back to viewer 1.23.5. It's fast, stable and easy to use.

You can find it here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Old_versions

1.23.4 also still works, but viewers before 1.23 won't let login anymore since Adult content has been introduced with 1.23.

1.23 will stay available according to Philip Linden/Rosedale as long as 2/3 is not to full satisfactory. And they are not. It has been winked by Philip that he is thinking of redesigning the 2/3 viewer. From my expection, 1.23.5 will be supported at least another year untill we get a viewer that actually works better for a larger group. 

Again, a warm welcome back and have fun

 

[Victoria Hoorenbeek]

Thanks for the replies, so if I understand correctly, SL uses my desktop resolution? This would be ok for me. Any possibility to switch to fullscreen mode? I removed the action from left-click in the world but the camera is still wiered and reverses forward and backward movement of my character. This is so broken, I remember having full control over the camera before. The management of the camera feel pretty dumb now. I have found out, that revmoving the GL shader support in the Hardware tab greatly improves performance, but after changing one peace of clothing my character changed into a white bubble and ist not recovering from it. I did several restarts, removed the chach an even gave SL about half an hour to download data but no use. Kind regards

[Linda Brynner]

I would not use the official viewer 2 or 3 Victoria, it is way to buggy. There are so many glitches. It is not for nothing not many actually use it (less than 10%). Most users login with 3rd parties or the 1.23. I would suggest to take a look at those.

[Thrayce Lanley]

Hi Victoria!

I'm still trying myself to wrap my head around the reason for LL (not to mention almost ALL of the TPVs) dropping fullscreen from thier viewer.  I'm using Kirsten's latest iteration, actually a variation called Niran's viewer, and fullscreen is right there where I like it.  It's seems odd to me that LL would drop the idea when there's usually an increase in FPS under fullscreen, as is the case with almost ALL modern games; this has to do with the way resources are handed to the GPU under that particular mode.  Furthermore, there's FAR MORE real estate on the screen in FS-Mode.

Somewhere in this forum, there's a thread about the relationship between the end-users' hardware and the eyecandy that one can take advantage of.  Nonetheless, if you were running SL decently before, you should be able to run it just fine now, howbeit with a little tweaking...:matte-motes-big-grin-wink:

Welcome back, BTW! 

[Tristizia Demonista]

---

Linda Brynner wrote:

I would not use the official viewer 2 or 3 Victoria, it is way to buggy. There are so many glitches. It is not for nothing not many actually use it

(less than 10%

). Most users login with 3rd parties or the 1.23. I would suggest to take a look at those.

---

I would really like to know where you get your numbers from

Ohh, and btw, there are plenty of TPV's which are basically V2 too (Firestorm, Dolphin 3, Kirstens etc.), just sayin!

To the OP, as much as some ppl like the old Viewer, it's a thing of the past as more and more funtionality is missing in them that is available in a modern Viewer! 

And for the Camera Controls, i prefer the crtl+alt+Mousebutton Method any time over that cumbersome Camerawindowthingie  

[Thrayce Lanley]

"Viewer 2 has already been highly under huge fire since only a handful seems to like it, but worse... with each quick release of an update came terrible show stop problems for too many users."

Define a "handful" and "too many".

"...for Duo core computers FPS has dropped significant since 2.8, like from an averge 35-45 to 1-5."

In all honesty, I have not seen this.  Someone seeing that kind of performance drop needs to re-examine thier viewer installation, or at the very least, to  check thier driver setup.  Duo/Dual-Core setups aren't actually 'supported' by most viewers, rather the CPU-workload gets evenly-distributed between the cores; dual-core, quad-core, this even-distribution is built-into the hardware and any OS from Vista onward by default.  I've asked around, and no one I spoke to sees any connection between multiple-cores and a drop in FPS.

"I waved 2/3 goodbye after a half year of all kinds of misery and went back to viewer 1.23.5. It's fast, stable and easy to use."

Agreed, and this seems to be something that LL needs to pay more attention to.  However, the 1.2-versions lack the structure to support the majority of features that a LOT of people  (MUCH more than 5-10%...)  want.  As has already been said, it's an old standard, and has almost completely fallen into the 'outdated' category.  On the Phoenix/Firestorm website, you can almost hear the developers pleading with users to accept this reality.

 "...as long as 2/3 is not to full satisfactory. And they are not."

Does this imply that V2 and V3 users are idiots?

Don't get me wrong.  I completely agree that there are certain elements of V1.23 that simply 'worked better', but that being said, the 1.23 architecture is becoming limited. 

 

[JeanneAnne]

I was going to give up on SL within days of having discovered it, because Viewer2 was so bad. Fortunately, I found out about Firestorm and like it much, Much, MUCH better. I haven't tried Viewer3 but my advice is that you try the Firestorm viewer.

Jeanne